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Herself and I visited Budapest about five years ago, and it hadn't yet come on to the agenda for another visit. But Little Sister wanted to go there, and was looking for a travelling companion. Never one to leave her in dire straits, I gallantly stepped into the breach.

Apart from the normal aspiration to enjoy a short break, I was curious to see if the increased interest in Budapest as a destination had brought about changes for the worse, as Herself and I (like many others) had found in Prague.

Preparation was thorough. I chose to rely primarily on my memory, unreliable though it be, supplemented by some suggestions from the denizens of rec.travel.europe. LS borrowed a guidebook, which she didn't read, choosing instead to put her faith in her brother and, more reliably, in serendipity.

The inconvenience of a 6.00 a.m. check-in at an already crowded Dublin Airport was compensated by our arriving in Budapest before lunchtime. Following the advice I so willingly give to others, the only provision I had made to acquire Hungarian currency was to bring my ATM card. The machine in the airport initially declined to co-operate with my programme, but an appropriate incantation of entreaties laced with imprecations eventually worked its magic, and we passed through the arrivals area furnished with an impressively large number of Forints (254 to the euro).

The best deal in Budapest for getting from the airport to one's hotel is the minibus service -- door-to-door for only a few thousand Forints. We needed to get to grips rapidly with the idea that a few thousand Forints is not an awful lot of money.

The hotel was a risk element in our programme. We had chosen it from the travel company's website, and I had been unable to find any independent review of it. I had a fair amount of confidence in the travel operator, though, because they had never sent me to an unsatisfactory hotel (readers in Ireland might like to note that I use Alan Lynch Travel, t/a Citiescapes). In the event, despite having a name that to Irish ears conjures up images of Chinese restaurants, the Golden Park made a good initial impression -- bright, clean, busy, and with friendly reception staff. Even though we arrived around midday, our rooms were ready. I had thought that single rooms were the stuff of monasteries, convents, and history, but the Golden Park -- recently fully refurbished -- has genuine singles. We unpacked, took a little rest to compensate for our early start, freshened up, and headed out on our first expedition.

I realised that we were only about 100m. from where I had stayed previously, so I knew where we were in relation to the sites of main tourist interest.  We walked the length of Rakoczi ut, a wide business street, heading for the city centre. Things had changed since my last visit: many of the small shops and pavement stalls were gone. I have no idea if their proprietors had found better-paying activities, or if they were driven out by inability to make a worthwhile living. I especially regretted the disappearance of a particular cafe which Herself and I had adopted, and which had served us luxurious pastries, veritable cholesterol bombs.

Along Vaci utca (what's the difference between an ut and an utca? Uts seem to be more important thoroughfares than utcas.) to Cafe Gerbeaud, perhaps the best-promoted of Budapest's great coffee houses, to take coffee and cake in a fine room in the company of other visitors, all of us pretending to be having a typical Hungarian experience. The quality of the cake justified our temporarily dropping the traveller tag and becoming tourists for half an hour.

Thence to the Danube, with the intention of crossing by the Chain Bridge to the Castle Mount. No go. The bridge was closed to pedestrians because of preparations for the morrow's celebrations of Szankt Istvan's day, which is Hungary's national day.

Okay, then -- a walk by the river to the next bridge, the elegant Elizabeth Bridge. Yet again, I wondered how Strauss could have seen the Danube as blue; it most emphatically mud-brown, and I have never seen it otherwise.

At Elizabeth Bridge, we were again thwarted -- no pedestrian access. Oh, well: what's the hurry? Buda isn't going away.

Some more casual rambling, then back to the hotel, a very good meal at an adjacent restaurant, beer in the hotel bar (where the barman revealed a surprising lack of interest in Hungary's participation in a closely-contested team sabre Olympic final on the large-screen television) and that was enough for a day which had started at 4.30 a.m.